May 12, 2016

Harvard’s clueless illiberalism – The Washington Post: “Touring early America, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the people’s propensity to form associations for every purpose under the sun: ‘religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small . . . to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes.’

Associational proliferation buttressed individual freedom, Tocqueville believed. As he explained, private groups are nimbler at orchestrating cultural and social life — ‘maintain[ing] and renew[ing] the circulation of sentiments and ideas’ — than government could ever be.

States ‘exercise an insupportable tyranny, even without wishing to, for a government knows only how to dictate precise rules; it imposes the sentiments and the ideas that it favors, and it is always hard to distinguish its counsels from its orders,’ he wrote.

Harvard University’s administrators should read Tocqueville’s book ‘Democracy in America.’ Their institution is not, strictly speaking, a state — it’s more of a state within a state, up there in Cambridge, Mass. In every other way, the school’s new crackdown on fraternities, sororities and a local variant, ‘final clubs,’ epitomizes the clueless illiberalism against which the French sociologist warned.

Harvard has concluded that, in response to sexual assault and other manifestations of gender inequity, it must reform campus culture. Single-gender social organizations are unavoidably discriminatory, President Drew Gilpin Faust noted, ‘in many cases enacting forms of privilege and exclusion,’ contrary to what Harvard stands for.

Being private, self-funded and, technically, off-campus, the groups can’t be banned; but they can, and will, be discouraged and stigmatized. Starting with the class admitted in 2017, no student members of single-gender fraternities, sororities or final clubs may hold ‘leadership positions’ in Harvard’s hundreds of officially ‘recognized’ undergraduate organizations. Nor may they apply for fellowships, such as the Rhodes and Marshall scholarships, that require an official college endorsement.”

Read the whole thing.

It’s interesting to me that suddenly the various groups who have been in favor of limiting freedoms they don’t agree with have suddenly become outraged when their own particular ox is up for goring. This has been the (sadly missed) point of the voices who have spoken out against Social Justice Warriors and anti-free speech people lately. What’s become of “I don’t agree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it?”. It’s been flushed down the PC toilet. And now the next step is to deny under penalty of economic sanction the freedom of association that we take for granted in America.

And just so I preempt the people would would say “but Harvard is private! They can do whatever they want! Freedom of association is only a government thing!”: you don’t really get the bigger point here? But don’t worry, your ox is up for goring next.